如何在Ubuntu上安装php本地化字符串

Question

I run an apache webserver on my local machine, and php built-in date localization does not work there. As stated in the strftime documentation, the following code should display the current day in different languages :

setlocale(LC_TIME, "C");
echo strftime("%A translates to ");
setlocale(LC_TIME, "fr_FR");
echo strftime("%A in French");

But I get : "Thursday translates to Thursday in French".

On another (well configured) server, the same code returns: "Thursday translates to jeudi in French". I think my locale machine is missing some php french strings, but I cannot find how to install it.

I use PHP Version 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.9. Here is the (truncated) output of locale -a command :

C
C.UTF-8
...
fr_FR.utf8
... 
POSIX

fr_FR is absent but fr_FR.utf8 is present.

Edit: I have to use setlocale(LC_TIME, "fr_FR.utf8"); to make it work. How to make the fr_FR version work ?

Answer 1

It seams that the language packs do not have the exact same name on different servers (depending on OS, version, installed packages, ... ?). For French, sometimes it's simply fr_FR, sometimes fr_FR.utf8, sometimes fr_FR.UTF8, ...

Fortunately, the php setlocale function take care of this case, and accept a list of locale names. So you can specify all those different names, and php will get the first correct one.

setlocale('fr_FR', 'fr_FR.utf8', 'fr_FR.UTF8', 'French');